Our Data Warehouse Maintenance and Production Support Methodology

The implicit nature of the data warehouse to undergo changes makes its maintenance very crucial. Post-implementation maintenance issues can prove to be critical to success of data warehouse projects. In addition to issues that are operational in nature, data warehouse maintenance includes issues related to growth and upgrades of the data warehouse itself.

The flip-side of the coin is the complexity involved in data warehouse maintenance. Therefore, a structured approach to maintenance is necessary to address maintenance issues associated with data warehouses. Information Architects data warehouse maintenance methodology is a structured scalable approach that ensures smooth operability of the warehouse and is geared to provide flexible enhancements to warehouse architecture.

Information Architects data warehouse maintenance methodology covers the entire spectrum of maintenance categories to provide comprehensive maintenance solutions to clients in pre- and post-implementation scenarios.

The maintenance activities have been divided into four categories:

·         Corrective Maintenance

Corrective maintenance consists of two distinct processes: 

Defect Identification results from careful monitoring of various data warehouse processes. This process horizontally caters the data warehouse; from ETL batch monitoring to OLAP reporting. This process utilizes skilled and experienced human resources and automated tools.

Defect Rectification consists of “Triage”, “Investigation” and “Fix” phases to rectify defects identified by the earlier process.

Example scenarios that qualify for this category of maintenance include processing partial changes in sources systems as updates to the data warehouse and impact analysis of business changes in view of historical data in the data warehouse.

 ·         Adaptive Maintenance

The framework ensures easy transition of warehouse if there is a change in the operating environment of the warehouse such that the transition is transparent to the users. This change may be in the hardware infrastructure, operating system or the DBMS.

Extended scenarios that also qualify for this category of maintenance include impact of change in the underlying infrastructure on the structure of data warehouse itself and analysis of such changes on end-user queries and reports.

·         Preventive Maintenance

In parallel to the reactive nature of “Corrective Maintenance”, the framework provides a proactive approach of “Preventive Maintenance”. The maintenance team continuously reviews the data warehouse to point out potential defects even if no prior incidents are logged.

Example scenarios that qualify for this category of maintenance include refinement of aggregate and summarization structures and conduction of security audits.

·         Perfective Maintenance

The framework can be leveraged for rapid enhancement and refinement of the warehouse to provide improved functionality and better user experience.

Example scenarios that qualify for this category of maintenance include performance tuning, query tweaking, qualifying a part of historical data to be purged, identification of new aggregate and summarization structures and identifying “holes” in the data. Furthermore, usability audits for data warehouse users may be conducted to identify scenarios that may lead to discovery of useful business insight.

Maintenance Priority Allocation

Taking a bottom-up approach, DBMS related issues take highest priority and call for urgent response; followed by ETL and then OLAP. However, certain issues may be ranked higher in priority depending upon client’s requirements.

Information Architects' team specializes in providing comprehensive data warehouse maintenance service to clients . There is a dedicated team of experts to handle the entire spectrum of data maintenance issues 24/7/365.

Information Architects employ an open architecture (vendor independent), open tool (product agnostic) policy. We help clients develop solutions in their own preferred environment configured to maximally leverage existing resources, therefore providing flexibility to accommodate variable budgets, and we are equally well versed with Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata and Sybase.

  OUR PROPOSITION

Information Architects’ looks forward to developing a business association with clients by offering its data warehouse maintenance services. The following are the main highlights of our proposition:

·         Batch monitoring and operation

·         Cost effective and experienced on-call resources

·        Identify and fill information holes that may have been left in the data warehouse at requirements gathering stage or may have appeared due to changed business needs

·         Structural-impact analysis of business changes on the data warehouse and historical data stored within

·         Impact analysis of data warehouse structural changes on end-user queries and reports

·         Processing of partial updates in source systems and their propagation to the data warehouse

·         Data warehouse environment upgrade support (hardware, operating system and DBMS)

·         Regular performance tuning, query tweaking and refinement of aggregate and summarization structures

·         Improved “Change Request” management with shorter turn-around time and regular control meetings

·         Improved metadata management